1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a motion vector processing (including storage or transmission) device, for processing motion vectors corresponding to pictures being subdivided into a number of blocks. For each of these blocks a motion vector is available for efficient storage, transmission or processing (e.g. scan rate conversion) etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
The availability of only one vector per block of pixels can give rise to the visibility of these blocks in a picture obtained by such motion compensated processing. As a possible solution to reduce the visibility of the blocks, the vector field could be postfiltered, but this has the disadvantage that new vectors are generated, the quality of which was never checked. U.S. Pat. No. 4,703,350 describes such a post filter, which uses a raised cosine function or a linear interpolation filter to obtain motion vectors for each pixel.
When the estimator uses a matching criterion, it is possible that the average of two vectors each yielding a good match, results in a vector that gives a very bad match. One could for instance think of a periodic structure on which several matches are possible, but on which the average vector may yield a bad match.